Transition Choices
The dark side of America is it's consumer culture. We no longer have a platform for respectful social change like the civil rights movement. Will Obama fall for this trap?
Bama Obama a Cliché on Every Corner
Every cliché exists, especially if you live in the state of Alabama. So if you want to live by unthinking standards, lukewarm ethics, poly and monosaturated bliss step right up, America has it all and Alabama has supersized it. We can't call attention to our real weaknesses, we live by the culture of cool and those guidelines don't allow for true self depth or genuine self expression in "un-marketable" form so we shrink in resources, community value, and organizational competence. This is nothing new.
And without newness we don't see progress or change. The true irony of course is there is nothing new. Naively we forget all that has gone before us, except Michael Phelps who accepted his bevy of medals and will keep striving for more gold. Michael could feign humbleness, and remember his predecessors. Could he really remember Jesse Owens, a black athlete competing in the Olympics under the watchful eye of Hitler? Can he make sense of why the Bush family seems to own the Olympics along with their would be successor John McCain? It makes uncanny good common sense that a president would choose propaganda over leadership. Bush chose to be a tourist in China while Georgia has gone to war. Are you going to tell me that showing up to the Olympics making politically appropriate speeches is the correct diplomatic understatement? Nixon went to China and gained a place in history. GW Bush has not been known for his international diplomacy and capabilities so the real question is what will he actually do about true change of Human Rights abuse, how does he negatively affect true change? In Alabama, where McCain's sixteen year old spent the summer (who else would choose 95 degree heat with humidity?) we are under siege with racial issues, rights of privacy and classist wars of proprietary rights. People have learned to sublimate hatred. In Birmingham, where the public eye turned in the 1960's to witness an authoritarian whiplash of racism, we act like the scene with dogs and police is over because we built a museum around the experience. Because our children don't understand the human rights fight, in just the way we did, the fight is over. The "new" South has moved us into the millennium. Hatred still burns brightly. Smugly my Republican friends count Condoleezza Rice as one of their own. "Conde" doesn't want to come back to the South after her work in D.C. is completed, she's too educated for that choice. She has her oil tanker.
Under the Bush regime the United States has become precariously balanced and misaligned to its own natural resources. Excuse me, green is the new black. Republicans from Yale, invented solar panels.
Why is Barack Obama allowing Bush, his moment of glory beside our athletes? How can Democrats sit by and think that the Olympics are not a source of pride and reassurance? The Olympics are highly political and full of opportunity for the seasoned professional gunning for victory. Where is voting Joe six pack's version of human rights in the world arena when he watches the Olympics hosted in Beijing? If a politician's job is to convey their message at a fifth grade level, well the Bush family and McCain have succeeded.